Susanne Kuhn in Denver

In her first solo museum show, Leipzig artist Susanne Kuhn presents six large-scale paintings at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver. Like the rest of the Leipzig contingent, Kuhn’s work has that peculiar blend of realistic light effects, fantastic architecture, figuration, and landscape that suggests an elusive narrative. In the Denver Post, Kyle MacMillan writes that Kuhn’s complex, psychologically charged paintings depict fanciful worlds, private and closed in many ways yet broadly resonant and open to a range of interpretations. “In slightly older works, such as ‘Melanie in the Forest’ (2005), K�hn created fictional landscapes, but in more recent works, she has turned to architectural realms, such as ‘Katja’s Dream’ (2007), a sprawling diptych with almost endless depth. The foreground room converges through a doorway into an adjacent room and a central diagonal continues into the distant outdoors, with a tiny, barely perceptible figure running in the distance. Adding to the overall sense of ambiguity, K�hn stretches the line of sight to nearly the breaking point as she simultaneously flattens the perspective in fascinating ways, with a bed appearing to have almost no depth at all.” Read more.

“Susanne Kuhn,” organized by MCA Denver and Kunstverein Freiburg, Germany. Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Denver, CO. Through August 10. NOTE: Beware the MCA Denver website–it’s all animated Flash pages with no separate URLs. Argh.